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Fish Pie
Fish pies are best made with cooked fish. Take turbot, salmon, brill, haddock, trout, or any kind of fish; strip off the skin and remove the bones. Cut the flesh in large scallops, cover the bottom of the dish with bechamel sauce, and on this place the fish in layers, seasoning each layer with pepper, salt, nutmeg, chopped mushrooms, shallot, parsley, and hard-boiled eggs; pour in a little more sauce, and fill up with the fish and seasoning. Cover with puff paste. Time, three-quarters of an hour to bake.
A Victorian composed pie rather than a mashed-potato-topped one: cooked fish layered with sauce under puff pastry. The book gives no quantities, so treat it as a method and scale to your dish.
- Start with cooked fishThe instruction at the top is the hinge. Raw fish under a lid of pastry that needs 45 minutes will be dry and shredded; poached or leftover fish that only has to heat through will not. Poach fillets 5-6 minutes in milk or court bouillon, then flake into large pieces.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; the book states only the time. Puff pastry wants 400-425F for the first 20 minutes to set the lamination, then 375F to finish; the recipe's three-quarters of an hour suits a dish of about 2 pints.
- Working proportionsFor a 2-pint pie dish: about 1 1/2 lb cooked fish, 1 pint bechamel, 2 hard-boiled eggs sliced, 4 oz mushrooms, one shallot, a small handful of parsley, and nutmeg grated over each layer rather than measured. Serves four to six.
- Make the bechamel thickA pouring sauce will thin further as the fish releases juices and can boil up into the pastry. Use roughly 1 1/2 oz butter and 1 1/2 oz flour to a pint of milk, and let it cool before assembling so the pastry lid does not slump.
- Cook the mushrooms and shallot firstChopped raw mushrooms shed a surprising amount of water into a sealed pie, and raw shallot stays harsh in 45 minutes under a crust. Sweat both in butter until dry, then cool before layering.
- Turbot and brillBoth are still fished but are expensive and often only sold as fillets or steaks. Haddock, hake, pollock or a mix of white fish with a little smoked haddock and salmon gives the same layered effect.
- Vent the crustCut a hole or two in the puff paste. Steam from a pint of sauce has to go somewhere, and a sealed lid lifts off the rim and leaks at the edge.
- ServingNothing is said about accompaniment. Plain boiled potatoes and a green vegetable would suit it, with any leftover sauce loosened and served separately.
The recipe reads as a general method rather than a fixed formula: no quantities are given, and it assumes cooked fish and a bechamel already to hand. The pastry-topped fish pie belongs to an older English tradition than the potato-topped version most people now mean by the name, and the seasoning list here - nutmeg, shallot, mushroom, parsley, hard-boiled egg - draws on the Anglo-French seasoning palette common in period cookery, applied straight to fish. Turbot and brill head the list of suggested fish; both were prized table fish of the period and were cooked whole and large, so remains would have been plentiful. In that sense it is a leftovers dish dressed for the dinner table, workable with any cooked fish.